A group of Whitehall officials are sitting listening with rapt attention to an account of the importance of scone-making for a group of three-year-olds. Such a scene would have been unimaginable a decade ago, a little far-fetched even five years ago. But children are now big political capital, and that means even civil servants are having to get their heads around the issues of child development.

What is driving the current rash of policy seminars across Whitehall is that Britain's rates of child poverty are among the worst in the developed world. We have the highest rate of relative poverty among households with children in the EU. Every year, 200,000 are born into poverty - one in three of all babies.

These kinds of statistics are not just a deep embarrassment to a country that believes itself to observe certain measures of decency, they are the figures that will determine our economic competitiveness in the 2020s. All the fashionable thinking about knowledge economies is predicated on a well-educated, highly skilled population. Yet the indicators point to a top quarter of English children doing brilliantly (currently the best readers in the world at ages 10 and 15) and a long tail of poor achievement that will hold Britain back unless we do something.

At the same time, there is now a substantial body of international research showing that investment in quality childcare pays handsome returns in higher levels of educational achievement, lower crime, etc. Hence, all the big brains trying to understand the importance of scone-making.

In the Treasury's current review of child poverty, serious redistribution policies such as benefit increases have been ruled off limits. The unquestioned assumption is that getting people into work is the best route out of poverty, and childcare is a necessary means to achieve that end.

What makes this welfare-to-work package so attractive to New Labour is its potential for a win-win strategy: reducing benefit bills by getting parents into work as well as raising children's pre-school achievement in good nurseries. New Labour concludes that this dream scenario is worth the investment.

But this scenario doesn't always accurately reflect what women want. There is strong evidence in the UK that mothers (and, to a much lesser extent, fathers) want to do the bulk of the care of very small children themselves - particularly in lower income groups. What they would prefer is help to do that - more paid parental leave, for example - rather than policies being engineered that encourage them to hand over the children to someone else so they can go back to work.

There is often a sense hanging over this area of New Labour policy of the middle-class professional woman projecting her own solutions on to those of lower income groups. What's the point of talking about paid work giving a parent an "opportunity for self-development" if that work is the anonymous, thankless job of a cleaner or catering assistant? Why can't being a parent be such an opportunity? The irony is that what New Labour likes to call the "most feminist government in history" has done a lot to undermine the importance and worth of motherhood with its insistence on getting everyone into work. The message has been clear: motherhood doesn't count as a job.

What worries those who have been researching and campaigning for years for better childcare policies is that while, for the first time, they are being listened to, there's a danger that it will all come to very little - for three reasons.

First, childcare is seen by the Treasury as primarily an adjunct to the labour market rather than being about child development. It's all about increasing employment opportunities rather than what might be best for children. Put the latter as the top priority and disturbing questions crop up, such as the findings which show that full-time employment for a mother can have a damaging impact on a child in the first few years.

Second, the Treasury may be listening but there's not much more money on the table. It wants to target "childcare for the poor, not all". But that threatens to backfire, entrenching inequality through the social segregation of a publicly funded childcare system for the poor alongside a private, market system for the well-off.

Third, and this is the killer-punch: where is the workforce for the expanding childcare sector going to come from? The turnover rate is diabolical, around 30%, which puts it on a par with call centres and retail work. This is not a job to which many people feel committed: it's poorly paid, with an abysmally low level of qualifications. Any hope of turning round this bleak recruitment and retention rate has to start with big pay hikes and increased training.

The current political enthusiasm for investment in early years often sounds like apple pie, a sort of comfort food for hungry Labour party activists. The mistake - and the Treasury is in danger of making it - is to think that this kind of comfort food can come cheap.